It takes a bit of setting up to get it to work as a normal user instead of as root, but it works well. Just make sure you are a member of all the appropriate groups (lp, lpadmin, I think in Ubuntu) and you should be OK.

Both ink and escputil utilities rely on the deprecated usblp kernel module, so depend on /dev/usb/lp* being available for raw access, whereas CUPS is now using libusb. As such, you may need to do something like